Preparatory Prayer:

"I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being." Psalm 103.

Setting:

A man kneeling at a low table, with a quill pen in his right hand, covering a sheet of parchment with writing. He is entirely absorbed in his task; a heavenly light shines in his face. This is the inspired writer Isaias, described by the Holy Ghost as "the great prophet, faithful in the sight of God." He looks into the future, he foresees the Passion of Our Lord, and describes it so vividly and so minutely as to seem to be an evangelist rather than a prophet. With much reverence I pick up his manuscript and in my Prayer today I am privileged to read the very words he set down, thousands of years before the Messiah came. "We have seen Him," he says, "and there was no sightliness that we should be desirous of Him; despised and the most abject of men, a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with infirmity . . . we have thought Him as it were a leper . . . He was wounded for our iniquities, He was bruised for our sins . . . He was offered because it was His own will . . . dumb as a lamb before his shearer . . . led as a sheep to the slaughter . . . ...

Fruit:

Sympathy with Our Lord in His Passion; that is, to feel with Him what He feels: some of His shame, loneliness, physical sufferings.

The Passion is a subject of inexhaustible meditation. All we propose to do this morning is to lift the veil and gaze reverently at the divine Sufferer in some scenes of the great drama. There is abundance of material for prayerful contemplation in every single detail of the story.

The first of these scenes takes place on Holy Thursday night. Our Lord has been arrested, and, says St. Ignatius, He "remained in bonds all that night." I take up my position outside the jail; I dare not try to get in because He is guarded and His cell is locked securely. So I come out into the open. It is night. There is full moon. A small rectangular window is placed high up in the wall of the prison, and through it the rays of the moon shine through, lighting up the tiny room.

There He is. I can see Him down there, seated on the floor, with both hands bound tight in front, His back resting wearily against the wall. He is utterly alone. This dreadful isolation has been with Him ever since the Supper; we might go farther and say that all His life He has been a Man apart. "I have trodden the winepress alone and of the Gentiles there is not a man with Me. I sought for one that would grieve together with Me, and there was none; no, not one."

Even if men had been willing to sympathize with Him that is, to enter into His thoughts and see how noble and worthy were His ideals even if they had been prepared to try to fathom the depths of His sorrows, He knows quite well that their efforts would be quite unavailing. With all the good will in the world they simply are incapable of such understanding and such sharing with Him His point of view.

In His aloneness in Gethsemani Jesus "being in an agony, prayed the longer." We may surely assume that here in His jail prayer once more is His refuge. May we not reasonably assert once again that "He spent the whole night in the prayer of God"?

Your truest friends too, O Christ, as I see in their lives, are invariably asked to share this isolation. One by one the human props collapse. And why, unless it be that, like You the Master, the disciple too must learn that there are regions into which no human friend, for all his willingness, is capable of entering? I quail before the prospect of this aloneness. Prayer, be my refuge.

• Man of Sorrows 2